Re: mknumeric_limits

[Phil Edwards <pedwards at disaster dot jaj dot com>]

I trust Benjamin and Gabriel will correct any mistakes I'm about to make. :-)

On Mon, Feb 19, 2001 at 10:01:44AM -0700, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> First, it seems rather odd to be using "uname" like that, unless this code
> is supposed to be run on the build machine.
> 
> Second, by using uname instead of a triplet, we lose the ability to
> select behavior on the triplet.  This is important when you consider
> systems like the PA which have two completely different toolchains that
> can not interoperate with each other.

That fragment predates just about everything else, such as configure.host
and configure.target, which are recent and use triplets.  mknumeric_limits
could be changed to use those, or maybe could call the generated tests_flags
script.  (Gaby? Sanity check?)


> Third, what's the purpose behind -nodefaultlibs, then listing the libraries
> you want explicitly?  If we're really just building something for the
> build system, why not let the compiler figure out what libraries need to
> be linked to create an executable?

Because later in that script we call the C++ compiler, which by default
will link in the c++ library... which we haven't built yet.  (There's code
like this in a couple of places, like src/Makefile.am.  Arguably we could
call libtool in mknumeric_limits and have it link gen_num_limits.)


Phil

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